Page 118 of The Tainted Cup

“He’s missing?” asked Miljin.

“Yes. Again! With the quakes so hard that the mud dances at our feet, and the titan-killer churning up the road out there. I shall behead the bastard when I find him again.” The princeps paused to look us over. “If Iudex is looking for him, though, then he’s done something serious…” She looked back at Kitlan and her people, impatiently waiting behind us. “And you’ve a contagion crew with you?”

“We need to know where he is immediately,” Miljin said to her. “Is there anyone who worked with him who might know?”

She shook her head. “Everyone’s off to assist with the bombard. Engineers say the titan’ll be here in a matter of days, maybe hours. Ditelus’s whole cohort is long gone.”

I looked at the princeps, thinking. It had been weeks since I’d last interrogated a princeps—the smirking Otirios, back in Daretana—but it suddenly came to me easier now, with death and madness rumbling past the horizon.

“You’re Ditelus’s commanding officer?” I asked.

“I’m the operating officer of this outpost, yes, sir,” she said.

“So you would have been the one to write up his demerits?”

“Ah—yes? The Iudex manages demerits now?”

“He was marked for absences, correct?” I said. “Did you ever catch him coming back to the outpost after his absence?”

“I did, a couple of times.”

“What direction might he have been comingfrom?” I asked. “And is there anything out there?”

She fetched a map and pointed to the spot. “He was coming from the west, back toward Talagray. There used to be an old Legion fortress that way, decades ago, but it got destroyed during a breach. Killed a titan and it fell right on top of it. Some Legionnaires used to sneak out to the ruins to get sotted back in my day. You think he’s there?”

“Much thanks, Princeps,” said Miljin curtly.

We left, mounted our horses, and departed, pausing only for Miljin to give me the tiniest nod—Well done.

—

“WE’RE IN Abad stretch of land now,” warned Kitlan as we rode. “You see anything moving that isn’t grass or leaves, don’t go near. The Plains are rife with contagion. Worm pits and nests and hives abound. This whole bit of world wishes to eat you.”

“Are we allowed to be here?” I wondered aloud.

“Allowed?” Kitlan snorted contemptuously. “No one bothers to fence off these lands, Signum. You’d have to be a fool to traipse in thoughtlessly.”

I didn’t argue. We’d entered a strange part of the Plains, with giant hills rising on either side of us covered in tussocks of thick, yellow grass—the remains of dead leviathans, surely, felled by the Legion decades if not centuries ago. There were so many hills that I began to wonder why we still called it the “Plains of the Path” at all. Much of this place had to be of higher elevation than the rest of the canton.

More disturbing still were the flowers on the ground about us. None were alike. There were blooms shaped like cups and funnels and rosettes and bells; some were huge and pendulous, others tiny as fleas; and in the deeper parts of the hills, where the rainwater gathered, the blooms grew as thick as the stars, yet all were of different colors, whorls of pink and orange and purple.

The sights did not cheer me, for I knew the ground here had long soaked in the otherworldly blood of the leviathans. Dappleglass no longer seemed such an uncommon threat.

I started glancing over my shoulder toward the east every few miles, looking up at the sky.

“What you looking for, Kol?” asked Miljin.

“Flares, sir,” I said. “Just in case.”

He laughed roughly. “Warning flares? That won’t matter, lad.”

“How might you mean, sir?”

“I mean, if we see red or yellow in the sky, it won’t matter. We’re too close to run. We’ll just be dead. So look forward, boy, and not back.”

I did as he asked, counting the hills about us as we passed. I’d memorized the princeps’s map, but it hadn’t been totally accurate regarding the number of carcasses about. Yet I knew we were getting close to the ruins of the fort.

Then one of the Apoths cried out: “Scent! Got scent!”